Azulejos - more than you wanted to know

To see a larger version, click on any of the images.

As with chimney pots, the Portuguese adopted the use of painted, decorative glazed ceramic tiles, which they call azulejos, from the Moors who apparently adapted their versions from the Phoenicians.

I recently started to look more carefully at the ubiquitous colourful and decorative ceramic tiles first in the Algarve and then in Lisboa.

The Moorish tiles tended to be geometric in design - for religious reasons figurative formats were not used by the Moors. These geometric patterned tiles are integral to the beauty of places like the Real Alcazar in Sevilla and the Alhambra in Granada in Spain.

It seems that the Portuguese liked the Moorish tiles so much that they tiled virtually everything that doesn't move, or so the Lonely Planet book proposes. Not surprisingly, the Portuguese adapted the Moorish hand painted tile images to their own liking, creating patterns that reflected and portrayed their own culture both religious and secular. The azulejos were extremely popular and the demand high. In the 17th century, blue and white Delft tiles from the Netherlands began to appear on walls in Portugal but Portuguese tile makers responded to this challenge with increasingly creative works of tile art which appear in churches and other major buildings in Lisboa and virtually everywhere in Portugal.

By the end of the 18th century industrial scale manufacturing apparently began to affect quality and with extensive rebuilding following the devastating earthquake of 1755 demand increased dramatically contributing further to diminishing quality.

In the 19th century, however, new art forms contributed to a resurgence of beautiful azulejos art in in places like the Lisbon metro, shops, restaurants and residential buildings - many by Raphael Bordalo Pinheiro (maybe his brother was also a tile painter as the street just outside our home base is named after Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro - a painter).

It is refreshing to see colourful azulejos everywhere, not only in the paving of buildings but on things as small as street names, house addresses and names of peoples' homes. And the street signs, for example, are not only attractive but when the street is named after someone the sign includes a word or two about why the person deserves recognition; for example Pintor (painter), Romancista, Escritor (both the latter two mean writer), Poeta, Cantor (singer), Dramaturgo (dramatist, playwrite), Navegador (navigator or sailor), Escola Mestre, (school master), etc. I found one street named after someone who was identified as a writer, poet and politician.

The first photo collage is a collection of street name signs - I have picked a few named after folks whose roles were identified. In the larger two, I have cut out from the sign the bit that identifies the person's career that is too small to read and pasted it onto the photo. In the smaller photos I did the same but pasted the enlarged bit below the photo.

The second is a collection of names of houses/homes and the third is similar collection of front or entry of the house/home to which the names in photo 2 belong. I especially like the Casa do Avô which means house/home of the grandfather.

The fourth is a collection of a few larger bits of tile art on the sides of several houses within a few blocks around our home base. The title I have put on this collage, "Algarve - Unmistakable Nooks in Portugal" is a rough translation of the inscription on the piece in the lower left hand corner of this collage. The sign in the lower right hand corner means beware of the dog.

The last is a poorly put together collage just to show some of the use of tiles to decorate surfaces on stairs, around doors, etc. The upper left is a close up photo of the tiles which are part of a wall (photo just below) - the wall is around a house on a corner near our place. The upper right is an outdoor stairway in a building also near us (there are lots of these around) and the bottom left is a beautifully decorated wall and "banister" of a public stairway in old town Albufeira. Finally the bottom right is a doorway of a house I like a lot which is along a walk way overlooking the ocean, also in old town Albufeira.

Well, more than you ever wanted to know about azulejos!